Saturday, July 19, 2008

WotLK Beta - Holy Builds

This looks to be the best single-target healing build you can make. It has the most spell power, the most crit, and a massive 2.4x crit multiplier. (For reference, a normal paladin has a 1.5x multiplier.)You also provide Imp Might and 3% crit for the raid.

I think this will be the standard 25-man raiding build, at least for the first Holy paladin in the raid. You are giving up any chance of an AoE heal, but the druids, priests and shamans can cover that while you concentrate on keeping the main tank up.

This build trades-off the extra spellpower and crit multiplier from the previous build in exchange for an AoE heal in Beacon of Light. Basically you trade raw single-target healing in exchange for flexibility. You also provide Imp Might and 3% crit for the raid.

I think this build will be very popular for 5 and 10-man instances. Since you have fewer other healers (or none) to cover your weaknesses, flexibility becomes more important.

Trade the goodies in Retribution for Blessing of Kings, Imp Devo Aura, and Divine Guardian. Also get Beacon of Light for some AoE healing.

Essentially, this is the "We don't have a Prot Paladin and people are whining for Kings" build. It should be pretty good for the second Holy paladin in a 25-man raid.

Edit: On EJ, Cathela posted an interesting way of looking at 25-man raid composition for paladins. Positing two default slots per class (fair, considering there are now 10 classes), Cathela proposes that it will break down as follows:

9 comments:

Right now, I'm planning on going with a holy/prot build like this:http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sxAzxMzGVuGxRZVGzhrcz

My guild doesn't have a protection paladin for Blessing of Sanctuary on a regular basis, so I'm specced deep enough prot to pick up Blessing of Sanctuary to make it available for raids.

Depending on how things change in the midst of a raid, I may move 5 points around to pick up Judgement of the Pure or Benediction. If Sanctuary is readily available without me, I'll drop it to get get Beaon of Light.

I disagree that sheathbot (I'm surprised everyone is using that silly name I came up with) will be the "standard 25-man" build. If anything it will be the small content build while the "traditional" 51/20/0 will be your main 25-man build.

For starters its raid utility is only unique when you don't have a ret pally. In 25-man raids any decent guild will most assuredly have one; deep ret is just that good now (I'm honestly willing to bet ret will become the "first" pally spec). 5% crit is actually much worse for throughput than the extra haste you gain from a traditional deep holy build as well. So you're left with the only additional thing you bring in a 25-man raid as a single target HoT (and Improved BoM, but I have never thought that talent should exist anyway).

The problem that I have with Sheathbot is that you're forcing yourself into a purely single target healer role and kind of shooting yourself in the foot while doing it. If you're going to be spamming a single target every 1.5-2 seconds chances are that HoT is going to go almost completely into overheal as your spammed Holy Lights/Flash of Lights will be continually healing the damage the HoT would have. You can't rely on the HoT to heal "off target" people since it only procs on critical heals. If you're in a situation where those HoT's and your normal heals are needed to keep a tank up you will have a resto druid rolling his lifeblooms and going crazy with his Nourish anyway in a 25-man (have you seen that spell yet, its INSANE efficiency that makes FoL look like Holy Light 11). So in reality the HoT is a small gain, and most likely none considering just how powerful Beacon of Light is.

So I think you have them backwards. Traditional 51/20/0 builds will be the 25-man build, the extra raid healing and especially utility (Divine Guardian is just pure sex) in conjunction with a ret pally stealing all Sheathbot's support will make it the best choice. Sheathbot on the other hand will be much better for small raids/groups as you might not have that ret pally to cover the extra utility as well as the HoT making slightly more impact without that assumed resto druid.

And a quick aside: Sheathbot specs should be more akin to this, as if you're going down ret you sure as hell better pick up that extra raid damage utility. Also, I'm not sure why you didn't include Aura Mastery in any of your builds; with Auras going raid-wide the ability to keep up Imp Devo or Imp Ret on as many people as possible will be of tantamount importance.

I think you underestimate the power of specialization, Dazanna. You already have shamans and priests covering the raid. Why have the paladin do the same job as well?

You're seeing Beacon of Light as a new 25-man raid tool. I'm seeing Beacon of Light as a tool to help with small group content. Something that helps when you don't have better group/raid healers.

I think that 2.4 multiplier, on a very high crit paladin, will make a significant difference. Especially as a lot of it becomes a HoT, making it more likely to be used than burn up into overhealing. Also, don't forget that Sheath gives extra SP. Sure you don't have a lot, but get in range of Battleshout or Unleashed Rage, and it adds up.

Also, yeah, your Sheathbot build looks better than mine. I just really like Imp Lay on Hands, and I wasn't paying much attention to the whole aura aspect.

The extra healing is worth considering, I'll give you that. Between the new raid-wide shouts and UR (and hell you could even get a Might thrown on you) you could get a nice hefty 300 or so extra healing.

I suppose the real value of the HoT component has to be weighed against what you're not getting. Does the HoT component outweigh 3% more healing (Improved Devo) and 6% more haste (full 5/5 Judgements of the Pure as opposed to 2/5) and losing the ability to do any sort of group healing (regardless of how good BoL is)?

Actually that would depend on the behavior of the HoT. The HoT heals for 60% of the heal that crit and I'm assuming its like almost every other HoT (except Lifebloom) and tics every 3 seconds. Naturally the strength of the HoT depends on the spell you cast. If you crit FoL for 3k you get a nice but inconsequential 1800 HoT (4 tics of 450, about half of a max rank Renew). If you get a nice fat 8k crit Holy Light you get an equally rotund 4800 HoT (4 tics of 1200).

The question then comes up as to whether the HoT "rolls". For example, lets say I get that HL crit and my 960 HoT is ticking along. The tank is safe so I start spamming Flash of Light on him. Now if one of these FoLs crits what happens? Does it overwrite the stronger HoT? Does it simply fail to apply a new HoT because there is a "more powerful spell active"? Or does it refresh the timer on the stronger HoT?

If the third is the case then yes, Sheathbot will be a nice utility spec. However, given the problems rolling Ignites have given the devs with Mages, I find it hard to believe they will turn around and dump the same thing on pallys. I personally think it will be the second case. Someone will have to test this.

But again, is it outweighing the losses? You lose your only AoE (regardless of how good it is), 6% spell haste (which, after getting to nearly 12% myself right now I can say is massive), 3% healing to everyone and a raid Pain Supression (in addition to some other nice abilities like Kings and the damage reduction from Imp RF). I'm still not sold on Sheathbot, it seems fun and useful in small group situations but I just don't think it's worth the trade.

And come on, if your going to argue that BoL is useless because other classes have AoE heals you must bring in the fact that all 4 healers have HoTs now (and the druid and priest ones are a lot more reliable and stackable than ours); its quite possible they won't need a pally HoT on a tank anyway.

And I think we can both agree that if BoL turns people into a shining gold toon everyone is going to spec for it. :)

I call this build shockadin three point oh.. might need some tweaking but it looks like a lot of fun, especially with the changes to spellpower -- gem for spellpower/crit. too hit starved to seriously dps in a raid, but enough healing to keep a tank up.

Not having tried any alpha/beta, I still have a lots of doubts on many talents - will Sheath of Light stack? will Beacon of Light be really useful with the short range? how much Mana will I get with an average gear (for Beacon of Light)? - so I'm planning to test these 3 builds:

PvP Beacon I'm so tired of getting stunned/cursed/feared/poisoned/abused in PvP, that I'll try to halve the duration of each possible debuff :-)

My only disappointment, so far, is that I don't see any good healing build for both PvE and PvP (as we have now), and I don't really like the idea of respeccing each week for Arena (not that I'm getting a high score anyway, but still...)

When I first looked at the new talents, I gawked at Beacon of Light...then I looked into the Ret. tree.

I think either way you go will change the role of the pally healer. What no one has mentioned is how Infusion of Light is going to affect the Ret side.

Take this scenario: a Sheathadin is spamming on the MT and crits, adding a HoT, simultaneously giving them time to Shock another member of the raid, or even themselves. If the shock crits, there's another HoT, and a reduction on the next Holy Light cast time.

With this playstyle, a healadin would be more than just a spambot, but would also be adding to their support base.

With added incentive to use Holy Shock, I know I'll personally be using it as much as possible.

I guess this poses the question: Take the added haste or the increased chance to add time efficiency to Holy Light?